At Le Web, Visions of Not-So-Social Future

By Neil Mcintosh

PARIS — Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt articulated Le Web’s obsessions on stage yesterday, when he talked about the future being social, local and mobile.

The social part of that equation can be controversial. Some Le Web attendees make a strong case for living open, largely shared lives. They are unconcerned about leaving a trail of metadata — location, tweets, photographs, video — wherever they go. Their attitude is articulated, in passionate discussions about privacy on the fringes of this conference, as: “Get over it.”

But, even at this most technically savvy of gatherings, not everyone wants to be social all the time. And on stage, some entrepreneurs clearly see opportunity in allowing users to digitally capture that information about day-to-day life, while also allowing much tighter control of what parts of that information is then shared to a wider world.

Privacy, it turns out, may be a business opportunity on the social Web.

Yesterday we heard from Path, a maker of smartphone software that helps create “a smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love.”

The social aspect of the service is intended to be limited to only family and very close friends; this is about sharing experiences with a dozen or two people, not hundreds or thousands. It’s even possile to imagine that users might store experiences on Path purely for their own benefit — a kind of high-tech personal diary.

On stage today, Evernote came closer to offering just that kind of service.

Evernote claims to let its users “capture anything.” Through desktop and mobile applications the service makes it simple to upload documents, photographs and other files to central, online storage, which can then be accessed wherever users can get online. It’s often used by businesspeople who want centralized storage of important documents, available for access via their desktop, laptop and mobile devices.

These new apps move Evernote closer to the consumer world, and that might sound alarm bells for business users who value discretion, and might live in fear of accidentally sharing sensitive documents.

But on Evernote, amid all this capturing and storing, the social features take a much lower profile. It’s possible to share your meals, captured in Evernote Food, on Twitter, or Facecbook, or via email. But, fundamentally, “Evernote is private,” said Mr. Libin. “It’s really intended for your own memory.”

It’s a different message from social media giants Facebook and Google+, both of which can do an excellent job of capturing what you are doing — but are designed to then broadcast that to at least some of your friends and contacts.

A more private way of tracking your life is not, yet, big business. Both Path and Evernote are much smaller businesses than the social media giants. Mr. Libin said Evernote now had 20 million users, with 750,000 paying for its premium service.

But it appears that now, should we choose to collect more information around our live — places we visit, important documents, contacts, photographs, ideas — we have the option of doing this in places which are fundamentally private, with only the option — at our explicit request — of making it public.

Add a Comment

About Tech Europe

Tech Europe covers Europe’s technology leaders, their companies, and the people and industries that support them — and their ideas. The blog is edited by Ben Rooney, with contributions from The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires.